June 23, 2004. BMC Bioinformaticspublishes “Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics”. We roll our eyes. Do people really do that? Is it really worthy of publication? However, we admit that if it happens then it’s good that people know about it.

October 17, 2012. A colleague on our internal Yammer network writes:Read the rest…

Update: as pointed out in the comments, the amusing error in this article has been “corrected” (or at least, “edited away”). Thanks for your interest.Update: I note that this article is now “Highly Accessed” ;)

It escaped my attention last year, in part because “Annals of Applied Statistics” is not high on my journal radar. However, other bloggers did pick it up: see posts at Reproducible Research Ideas and The Endeavour.

In this article, the authors examine several papers in their words “purporting to use microarray-based signatures of drug sensitivity derived from cell lines to predict patient response.” They find that not only are the results difficult to reproduce but in several cases, they simply cannot be reproduced due to simple, avoidable errors. In the introduction, they note that:

…a recent survey [Ioannidis et al. (2009)] of 18 quantitative papers published in Nature Genetics in the past two years found reproducibility was not achievable even in principle for 10.

You can get an idea of how bad things are by skimming through the sub-headings in the article. Here’s a selection of them:Read the rest…